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12/08/2003 Entry: "thinking backwards"

Spent a lot of Sunday in a fog. Part of the gray in my brain was from being out too late with driving duties.. shuffling young niece off to extended version of Fellowship of the Ring (LOTR 1). Most of the mindmush was a result of wading through Dan Burkholder's Making Digital Negatives for Contact Printing for the umpteenth time.

I didn't have much luck with my first digital negs but there was a bit of hope that the new UV printer might treat them better than my earlier attempts in direct sunlight. Saturday saw me playing with a spectral negative made from a digital camera capture. Looking over the dry cyanotypes on Sunday morning sent me back to Burkholder's tome in search of some hints on building a custom curve to adjust the tonal range. My problems with the original efforts, too flat and too much density in the highlights, had disappeared with the UV printer but I was now faced with the opposite effects, too wide a range in contrast for the cyanotype process to handle.

It looks like some more testing's ahead of me. I've made some step wedge images and will slowly make some changes in the Curves with Photoshop to try to get the full range of tones to print in cyanotype. This first attempt to fine tune a negative digitally is going to be a long, slow process but if I can master it, or at least become proficient, I may be emboldened enough to try some tri-color gum over cyanotpre soon. The hardest part for me will be working in backwards mode... if I make this part of the negative darker, it gets lighter in the print.

All this during the holidays, right? Still shopping and wrapping and shipping to do, but I'll find/make some time.